Serbia’s Organized Chaos

BALKANS AND EASTERN EUROPE, 2 Jun 2025

Diana Johnstone | Consortium News - TRANSCEND Media Service

Anti-government protest in Belgrade, Slavija Square, 22 Dec 2024.
Stefan Miljuš /Wikimedia Commons/ Public Domain

Serbia has been racked for months by disruptive protests largely attributed to students, opposition leaders and university authorities. Are these organic protests?

27 May 2025 – Serbia is a small country which used to be a favorite of Western Allied powers like France and Britain for its heroic resistance to Austrian and German invasion in two world wars.

They liked it so much that in redrawing European boundaries at Versailles in 1918, they enlarged it into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes which later became Yugoslavia.

Some Serb leaders at the time felt that this was too much, but at the time, Croat and Slovene leaders were glad to leave the Austro-Hungarian Empire and join the winning side.

All this changed abruptly in the 1990s. Germany had been reunited and began to drop its humble post-World War II foreign policy.  With German support and encouragement, the Yugoslav republics (states) of Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence, with the intention of joining the club of the rich: the European Union.

This shift enabled the two richest Yugoslav states to stop paying development funds for poorer regions such as Kosovo and to receive development funds from the EU.  The debt crisis of the 1970s had strained relations among the republics.

But according to the secessionists, their sole motivation was to escape from “Serbian nationalism.”  A great champion of this interpretation was the late Otto von Habsburg, an influential member of the European Parliament. As heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, dismantled as a result of World War I, he naturally held a personal grudge against Serbia.

As the Yugoslav disintegration grew confused and violent, Western media and government enthusiastically echoed the Habsburg line, not as such, but as defense of Western values and self-determination.

Western media put all the blame for everything on the Serbs, evoking the inevitable Hitler analogy to describe Serbia’s besieged leader, Slobodan Milosevic, as a “dictator” and to liken his failing efforts to keep Yugoslavia together with the Third Reich’s massive invasion of the rest of Europe.

“Heroic little Serbia” was transformed into the Pariah of the Western World.

A Nation in Limbo

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